


Blame the Dark on the Devil

by Nevcolleil



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-17 23:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17570159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: After Alfred Molina dies, Angus "Mac" MacGyver leaves the Army. He has no idea why mercenaries are chasing him across Southern Mexico or what the father who abandoned him as a child has to do with it. But luckily those mercenaries catch up with Mac in the same bar as one Jack Wyatt Dalton, who never re-enlisted after burning out of the CIA.Que one South American road trip, Mac and Jack unraveling the mystery of Mac's father one clue at a time, and the beginning of a bromance that will eventually develop into so much more.





	Blame the Dark on the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to the Brothers Osborne "It Ain't My Fault". It's to blame for this. And so are all my lovely Tumblr friends. I hope you enjoy this, guys. I know we all need a little fun right about now!

_Whiskey._

_Bonfire..._

_Pretty blond._

Under the right circumstances, that's a pretty nice combination.

Whether it was out at his Nana's place, sat beside Pop in a folding chair dug into the dirt, with his little cousins scampering around hooting and hollering nearby - or up at a buddy's fishing cabin with the team, stretched out on a log or in a truckbed, taking turns strumming songs on an old guitar - a young Jack Dalton spent some awful nice nights nursing a glass of good whiskey next to a roaring fire, watching sparks and smoke split across a starry sky. A number of those second kind of nights ended with a cute blonde snuggled up at Jack's side, whether or not they'd started out that way, but _these_ aren't those circumstances.

For one thing, this ain't Texas. If the filmy light filtering through the cracked, yellow glass of the windows to either end of the bar are anything to go by, it ain't night. Bonfires are meant for carefully twined and stacked piles of mesquite or pecan - not sticky bartops chipped and scarred from decades, probably, of nightly wear and tear, barfights, and minimal care.

For another thing, young Jackie's blondes were always female, not that the Jack of today seems to mind all that much - or any at all, apparently.

Said blond _literally_ lands in Jack's arms, Jack's only semi-conscious body breaking the dude's fall towards the dusty hardwood floor Jack must have slept on.

Oh, and he is _definitely_ a dude, nevermind all the silky blonde hair Jack finds himself spitting out of his mouth as he comes to. The guy's as tall as Jack - broader, even, in the shoulders, although he's plenty skinny, and _bony_ , everywhere else. (So says the many places those bones have no doubt bruised upon impact.)

Jack looks down at the angles he can see of the dude's face - straight nose, high cheekbones, sharp-cut jaw - and thinks, 'Well, helloooo, darlin'.

Actually - first he thinks of that old pick-up line, the one so god-awful no one uses it but everybody knows, about falling from heaven. But even half asleep and, probably, still mostly drunk, Jack's better than that, so 'Hello, darlin' it is.

And then another whiskey bottle explodes just over his and his "angel's" heads.

Jack reacts on instinct. He wraps his arms around his drop-in floor partner and rolls over, shielding the guy from broken glass and-

_Bullets._

Not a good mix with _any_ of those other things Jack'd just been ruminating upon, under any circumstances. But as it turns out, its not the flames eating up the bar counter to Jack's right, awful fast, that are popping the best bad liqour this little dive has to offer left and right.

Wherever Blondie flew in from, bullets are flying fast from that same direction.

And little wonder, as far as Jack's concerned about a split minute into his acquaintance with the man.

Blondie's tense as a taut bow. If Jack wasn't with it enough now to pick up on the dude's quick breathing, he'd have thought his body was covering a dead man's, gone right into rigor mortis, except the kid speaks. 

" _Get off of me!_ " he snaps. He's got a California voice to match the California hair - deeper than expected, maybe - but strained tight with alarm. Which would make sense , here on the Southern border of Mexico, in this ramshackle excuse of a shoulda-been -empty-right-about-now-save-for-Jack's-drunk-ass bar, getting shot at _and_ , potentially, enveloped by fire.

But somehow, Jack knows - he just _knows_ \- from the way Blondie says it that he's not quite adding up the bullets, and the flames, and Jack's body being the only thing between him and those two things - and registering that the bullets and the fire are the primary problems here.

Which- _Rude_.

" _Get off?"_ Jack repeats. "No... thanks for breaking... my fall, good sir?" Jack asks, pointedly, between lifting his head high enough that he's not speaking directly into the side of the other man's face and ducking as the literal firefight carrying on above them continues to develop. "No... sorry... for interruptin' your beauty sleep? Nothin'?"

"I have to put out this fire!" Blondie demands, like Jack's just here to stop him, and he doesn't sound sorry in the least.

Then he twists his head to look Jack in the face, and Jack gets a flash of bright blue eyes, gone wide but narrowing under furrowed brows suddenly.

"Wait," he says, the volume and tone of his voice leveling out, like he's been distracted into forgetting that he's kind of in the middle of something here, surely more offensive than Jack's sleep schedule. "You were _sleeping_ back here?"

Jack frowns. "Don't judge!"

Then someone on the other side of the fire starts to shout.

Actually, there's been a _lot_ of shouting going on in this bar in the past few minutes that Jack has been conscious in it, but a man lives through as many bar fights as Jack has (not to mention altercations of a less...disorganized fashion) and he develops a knack for blocking out what doesn't immediately concern himself.

And, unless Jack's Portuguese is rusty - and it's not - that shouting has just become of immediate concern to Jack's self.

"Oh, shit," Jack says, as Blondie says, "Oh, no," simultaneously. They look at one another.

But there's not a lot of time for questions. Jack rolls back to his left. He's not sure what Blondie's doing, but he sees the man moving out of the corner of his eye. Maybe three minutes have passed since Jack was so rudely awakened, and three minutes have been enough for the fire that he had watched, half-asleep, lick across the counter to form a formidable blanket of flames across the top of the bar. It's so hot that Jack's face burns with the heat of it, just rising into a squat. His eyes sting so that it's becoming more and more difficult to see, and both he and Blondie are coughing. Any minute those flames are going to spill over to this side of the bar, and then they'll _really_ have a problem.

But if Jack doesn't take care of the - Jack can only assume - mercenary who just told his buddies they'll wait until he's been smoked out to grab him, in the meantime it isn't actually going to matter.

Jack pulls out the trusty SIG that travels everywhere with him in the back waistband of his jeans; the glocks strapped to his calves he unholsters and sets on the shelf in front of him, grips angled for an easy grab. He sees a sudden movement in his peripheral and turns to see Blondie staring at him like he just pulled a dead puppy out of his pants instead.

"How do you have that many guns on you?" the kid actually hisses, like he's _scolding_ Jack or something.

"How do you _not_?" Jack demands. He tries not to pout about it, but he does possibly grumble a choice word under his breath as he tosses one of his glocks to the kid. 

And he possibly gasps, like a scandalized granny, when Blondie smoothly leans to the side, allowing Jack's all-too necessary backup backup piece to sail right past him and clatter onto the wood floor.

Who the _hell_ sent this kid?

" _What the hell are you doing_?" he asks.

"I'm generating carbon dioxide," Blondie says, like that's a normal thing that people say, going back to adding what looks to Jack like random splashes of random chemicals the kid found under the bar - or under the counter along the back wall - into an old metal bucket he'd probably rather not know the general purpose of. "Vinegar is acidic," he continues , eyes on his science project. "So when it mixes with baking soda, it releases sodium acetate -"

"Not what I meant, kid," Jack snaps.

That _barely_ earns Jack a second glance. "I'm trying to put this fire out."

"Yeah, right."

Well, it's not like Jack hadn't already figured he'd be fighting his way outta whatever this is, one way or the other. Not like Jack hasn't been fighting all on his own for some time now.

He doesn't need the prettyboy passivist - whoever he is and whatever he's doing down here on the ass-end of ol' Mexico.

"Okay..." Jack twirls his pistol into position in his gunhand with a huff, then grabs his remaining glock with his left. He shifts his stance and cracks his neck, steeling himself for what's coming next. "Guess it's just you and me then, fellas." And because a little extra luck couldn't hurt with how Jack's morning is going (or afternoon?) he gives each gun a kiss.

"Who are you- _No, wait_ -" Jack hears Blondie shout, but Jack is already in play. 

He knows Ermilio never bolted the bartop back down properly after the last brawl that busted it up, so Jack relies on that as a diversion to hopefully draw some figurative fire long enough for him to get out of the _literal_ fire without getting shot. He stands and kicks the bar counter in just the right way to send the flaming top of the large but rickety, flame-eaten structure flying forward - charred splinters of the counter below toppling forward.

Then Jack leaps over as much of the mess as he can clear, already shooting in the two directions from which he anticipates the spotty return shots that sound out as he moves.

Almost as soon as his boots hit floor again, he rolls. 

Because now he sees why, for all of their pot shots and shouting, his Portuguese friends - who are mostly just cursing indeterminately at the moment, from what Jack can hear - never followed the kid back behind the bar.

Loose wiring in rusty, brittle casing dangles from the ceiling like hanging moss, twisted from being coiled around the same dusty rafters for decades, probably. Jack would be surprised actually, that Emilio 's place with its bad lighting and single electrical outlet, over where the antique jukebox is plugged in, has that much juice running through it, but Jack's seen the moonshine distillery Ermilio's got rigged up out in the woods behind the bar.

Had? 

Through the busted windows on the other side of the bar, and above the overturned tables the Portuguese are ducking behind, Jack can see that it's not just the bar that got lit up while Jack somehow slept through whatever hell broke loose this morning in Macuspana.

Jack's pretty busy. The big metal pipe Jack knows stretches underground from Ermilio's distillery, up into the dirt basement beneath the bar, must have somehow _popped._ The wall of the bar standing above the spot the pipe enters the basement has a hole in it like someone shot a roman candle at it. Liqour pools there and lays in small puddles across the bar. The hanging wires dance as they touch one and then jerk into another, throwing up sparks and coaxing small flames to the surface of the puddles.

Jack has to roll, dodge, and weave, to avoid the wires and the little pools of fire. He's got only the sparks and the heat and the smoke to hide behind as he battles the men still shooting at him. He's already taken a flesh wound to his upper right arm...

But Jack gets a certain sense again, and after one of his shooters gets cocky and straightens tall enough for Jack to pick him off, Jack spares a second of his attention to holler back towards the bar, " _You_ did this, didn't you? "

"I thought you said not to judge!" Blondie hollers back. The little shit.

There's absolutely no reason for Jack to listen when he sees something moving from behind him out of the corner of his eye, and the guy yells, "Shoot it! "

To be honest, Jack doesn't actually decide to do it. He sees whatever Blondie lobs into the air - it's just a blurry blob of white in Jack's peripheral. He shoots in the direction of it, turns to return fire at whichever goon just got lucky enough to take a little denim and skin off of his left leg, and then Blondie barrels into him like a human torpedo.

And for being so skinny, the guy packs a punch. The impact lifts Jack plumb off of his feet, and he goes crashing through the bar's front door with the kid attached. 

They hit the ground beyond, _hard_ , in a tangle of limbs.

There's a sound like a bag of flour bursting inside of the bar, and big clouds of white smoke puff out of every exit. Everything inside of the bar has gone quiet.

Jack looks at the blond sprawled out across his chest and lifts his hands when he realizes that he's ended up _holding_ the man for the second time in less than half an hour, but he's too winded to say anything.

Blondie rises onto his elbows. He's sucking in big gulps of air, too, but he manages to repeat, "Sodium... nitrate." Like that's any sort of explanation.

Jack supposes it is.

He suddenly finds himself laughing with what little air he does have in his lungs, causing the kid to stare at him again like he's not sure he entirely believes what he sees.

Jack's pretty sure his early retirement just got a hell of a lot more interesting.


End file.
